Dating and sociability

Here are some extracts from the Second Edition of Essential Personalities, and why humans found love, adapted to monogamy and became better parents.

This is currently available in epub format on http://www.kobobooks.com.
click here to go to that title.


Dating

So why do we get so caught out in the making of relationships if it is all down to a system chosen by evolution to improve our fitness?


Part of the answer to this puzzle comes out of a study from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. Psychology researchers David Buss and Cindy Meston uncovered 237 motivations for why people have sex (Archives of Sexual Behavior, August, 2007). Motivations ranged from boredom to the spiritual, from the altruistic to the manipulative. Some had sex to feel powerful, to seek status or to impress their friends, and still others to debase themselves or to break up a rival's relationship or to extract revenge. Some looked for excitement or pleasure, and others had sex for purely utilitarian reasons such as wanting a baby or paying back favours, and others simply gave in to pressure or saw it as a duty. So sex in the social realm is not a simple act or a simple choice, though sometimes it may be, while its consequences may be unexpected as well as far reaching.


There is still the question of why we cannot more easily find our best partner in TO8 terms and live happily ever after.  We don't walk around with birth date lapel badges, so who is a suitable TO8 partner is not immediately clear. In early societies, the situation would have been different.  We would have known who was born around the same time as our birth. We would have known who formed our TO8 peer group. Modern life may not allow for this type of knowledge (although we do try to recover it, however imprecisely, with various forms of astrological peer group) but it principally confuses both the presentation of who we are to others and the reading of the underlying personalities of others.  This confusion is many-layered. The amount of drug and alcohol, for example is nowadays so prevalent that the chances are that anyone you meet in a social situation is in a significantly altered state. Drug use, and especially of cocaine, is so widespread that police no longer test money notes for evidence since 99% of all notes in the UK test positive for at least cocaine.  It takes roughly 2 weeks for a new note introduced into circulation to pick up minute traces of drugs from marijuana and ecstasy to amphetamines and heroin.


Another significant distortion of natural personality dispositions is pornography. Going into the statisitics and demographics of pornography is quite instructive. Porngraphy is the world's highest earning business. In 2006, it was 12% of the internet with 431 million pages. In 2006 over 40 million US men visited porn sites regularly.  One in three of porn site visitors are women.  20% of men and 13% of women access pornography at work.  17% of women say they are stuggling with a porn addiction, and 10% of all adults say they are addicted. 90% of children in the 8-16 year age-group have viewed pornography on-line and 80% of the 15-17 age-group have viewed hard-core pornography many times. The reasons why we consume pornography will have to wait until a subsequent book, but without taking any specific religious or cultural stance, one can see that the promise in widespread sexual activity unrelated to relationships, conceptions and births is an interference in the demands we may make upon each other.  This we can see this in the statistics that show 40% of marriages have unsatisfying sex lives.


Even our attempts to portray genuine relationships in the visual media of film and television distort the realities of the narrative of human relationships to extraordinary degrees. The necessities of plot and the demands of 'art' distort just about every human factor of a story not only in ideas of attractiveness and individual intelligence, but in the resolution of problems and the times scales in which they take place. Almost anyone who appears on the screen is tailored for that appearance with make-up, instructions on posture and how to move and how to talk. Most conversations we witness take place between two people, one person at a time, because that is the only way the filming process can easily be done, but it is not very real and it induces us to simplify our contemplation of that person in a way that is hardly possible in real life.


Consumer goods also confuse our portrayals of ourselves. Associating riches with intelligence, vitality and moral goodness or justification is a theme that has always run through human culture, but, through the modern consumer society, our goods now allow us to associate with many more heroes than ever before, and to represent their values without ever having to be 'proved' in the real world.  Even if this may liberate humans, it is undoubtedly a means to disguise, consciously or not, who we really are and thus complicate the search for the partner most suitable for us.


A fine indication of this confusion can be found in dating sites. In spite of a plethora of personality testing schemes, and the dating companies marketing ploys, most users of these sites are rather disastified with the results.  Traditional sites set up to matchmake relationships are turning into simpler dating sites for those with specific needs.  Traditional relationship matching methods do not seem to work because unreasonable expectations and mis-representations are too widespread for the systems to work sufficiently well. We do not know ourselves well and even when we want to express who we really are we use incorrect language. Personality tests are quite good in assessing traits but they are less good in assessing both the background hum of our underlying drives and the directions that inform our everyday decisions.


The image we have of ourselves and also the way we can present ourselves to others get confused by social forces. Further, the success that society has in improving survival rates for all sorts of unstable relationship mixes confuses the picture considerably. Economic and political systems serve to confuse the picture even more by controlling how people can get together and mate. But even though these complexities may dilute or impede the matching of types shown by the TO8, over the long run, the trend is unmistakeable. Happier couples produce offspring that reproduce themselves, while unhappy, or otherwise unstable partnerships produce fewer offspring who produce fewer offspring in their turn.


A study by the Max Planck Institute published in 2011 was quite clear about parents the world over being happier than their peers without children in later life (after 40 years of age) contradicting the widespread belief that parents are either less happy or no more happy than childless peers. Even more interesting is that parents' happiness is rising, a fact that helps support my contention that increased liberalisation around the world better enables individuals to find their appropriate mate, and thus be happier as parents.


The attraction of types in the TO8 goes a long way to explain many 'anomalies' of social interaction - just why some are preferred over others in spite of objective criteria. It can explain not only why individuals attract each other in spite of objective physical attributes and also the dynamic in families where some children are liked by their parents and others less so (due to incompatible types in the TO8), and vice versa, or why handicapped children can be loved as strongly as healthy ones.


More and more research is confirming exactly what I consider in my book; that the most successful long standing partnerships are those among equals, not necessarily equals in social standing or even background, which studies show often governs attraction, but those who can equalise their committments in the relationship. When one person's needs and expectations dominate a relationship, that is the recipe for unhappiness.  Where does such an equality come from if not from type?

Sociability

The Landscape, as part of the TO8, is the foundation of what we might call our sociability because it fixes the presence of the social fundamentals in human culture. Nowadays we would think of this as describing the social networks that we all seem to want to belong to. Social networks are only part of the story, and theories of human sociability do not explain why there are ever-present types who do not want to belong to social groups, who do not necessarily find their fulfilment in the now of society. These non-Landscape individuals (in the TO8) provide a necessary balance to the social network; the balance that comes from independence and creativity. Social theories have yet to explain the mystery of why individuals do not torture on command or who demonstrate at risk of death against oppression, or who love at any cost, or who are generous against their own best interests; who keep their word in the face of pain and death. We find these types throughout the ages and societies of history. If sociability was a benefit driven by nothing but genes, it would be selected preferentially and any drive for independence would be driven out very quickly, in a few generations. But not only do humans give themselves up to group behaviours they also very prominently act on their own account even against their own best material or social interests which is not something one would expect to be reinforced by natural selection or explained by conventional theories of altruism. Without a theory that also explains systematically these ever-present types in human society, a theory of social behaviour that only deals with the giving up of individuality to the collective will fail. 'Groupthink' is not the only way we make decisions and solve problems.


Interestingly, a 'resistance' to a collapse into pure sociability can be shown. Research into social media overstates its case for connecting people. People may have huge numbers of contacts in their 'friends' list (I have a friend who happily links to anyone on Facebook who has a connection to her whether or not she knows them) and recent research into the reach of Facebook may put the average steps of linkages to any other member at between 3 and 4, yet the difference between contacts in social media and real life friends is enormous. A Melbourne based analysis of online and real time socialising data shows an average Australian has about 154 online friends, but only 14 friends in real life. Women have an average of 174 contacts online but only 12 genuine friends. Men have fewer contacts but slightly more real friends. World-wide mobile phone analyses show that 80% of all mobile calls are made by people to just 4 others.


I argue that sociability found with Landscape behaviours in the TO8 certainly involves information, and this is why social media is successsful, but it also involves relationships of a certain quality, and genuinely cohesive society is formed from a mix of types.


Even so, could there be a gene for sociability? And people who don't have it are loners and mavericks occurring at random? Could there be a gene for the maverick? Obviously there are conditions which require more sociability than independence, and where independence is a liability to the survival of the individual, and situations where this is reversed. It's hard to come up with a theory of gene selection that maintains a balance of both behaviours over long periods of time. So the chances are that there is a gene for sociability - being the dominant behaviour - and not the other. Researchers seem to have found evidence that a sociable person can be assessed as such by strangers within seconds, and that this relates to the higher likelihood of the presence of an allele of an oxytocin receptor gene in those observed. (Receptor distribution in general is related to sociability in several species.) People with this allele report being more social, and are less inclined to autism. (Otherwise known as the 'love hormone', oxytocin is now sold over the counter in nasal spray form as a 'relationship facilitator').


There are problems with this particular study. It employed already established couples (23 of them, a small sample) in a contrived social circumstance (confession of a serious nature) and did not look for the presence of the gene in those doing the guessing. Even if the action of the receptor is unequivocally linked to greater oxytocin levels and feeling cuddly, the question how much of it one needs to make a relationship or the relevance of the hormone to real-life social interaction is not answered. Its actual lifetime in the blood is about 3 minutes, and although oxytocin may be secreted in several places in the body, such secretions fail to get across the blood-brain barrier and into the brain. Many studies use a nasal spray to deliver the oxytocin but it is not clear how much oxytocin enters the brain from their use. Some studies even show an adverse social reaction to oxytocin, and too much of it in women giving birth can inhibit labour and 'freeze up' the womb.


The oxytocin research does throw an interesting light, however, on one of the functions of the female orgasm – giving birth.  The birth canal is surrounded by tissue similar to the tissue of the penis, and there is evidence that the female orgasm assists in the birth process, and indeed can be used to help difficult births along. The ease with which men and women achieve orgasm is related to their testosterone levels, and testosterone levels seems to be modulated by socialising and parenting behaviours as much or more as they are indicative of male aggression. Sex is very much the significant purpose behind human relationships, so we can begin to see a neat link up between relationships, sex, and birthing success.
Social behaviours exist in a context, and our actual consciousness is metagenic, that is, the result of actions of many genes and the autonomic systems that they initiate. The human personality is composed by many such systems, so while there are genes whose actions could have overt behavioural effects, if a distinct human personality were in essence heritable, consistent types could be traced through families and this is clearly not the case (welcome types would multiply rapidly while unwelcome types could be easily eradicated from the gene pool by heavy policing). How do genes explain the observations that marriage modulates male behaviour, or that levels of testosterone in men are not related to aggression per se but to status-seeking, socialised behaviours or that happier more engaged fathers have higher levels of testosterone than remote un-engaged fathers. How do we explain the bizarre preferences of parents for their children, of siblings for parents or for each other, of fans of people they have never met? And yet, personality types are recognisable and found repeatedly through the generations. This persistence can be related systematically in the TO8 to the solar year and to the hemisphere of birth, an astounding piece of confirmatory evidence that shows our personality is less simply controlled by genes than we think.

Sociability and the Landscape

Much is made of recent news that members of social media seem to have larger grey matter in areas of the brain, although which came first cannot be assessed. As I hypothesise, Landscape behaviours, the dominant personality influences on individuals, makes up the majority of behaviours described by the TO8. Out of 64 distinguishable types, 48 of them have some Landscape component or resolve to it in later life, while 16 experience no Landscape at all and will find it both difficult to make their way in social life and be able to resist social pressures. So it is reasonable to assume that if there are structures in the brain (like grey matter - also connected with intelligence) that can be related to sociability then they are connected to the system of development I propose. Furthermore, since individuals resolve to the Landscape in later life, it is reasonable to suppose that the grey matter might increase over time in some individuals but not all, which could be verified experimentally. The solutions of the TO8 cover the questions of why sociability is stronger in some but not in others and also the evolution of sociability throughout an individual's life.


The TO8 Landscape is a useful tool for clarifying many mysteries of a social nature. An interesting example appeared in the British press recently and caused quite a stir. A recent study showed significant achievement differences between children born in the UK in August, at the end of the school year and those born in September, at the beginning of the school year. While it is easy to appreciate that the youngest of a school year are likely to have more problems than the oldest, it is difficult to be clear about all the causes of this difference. In my observations, the difference between August and September marks a difference between a non-Landscape type and a Landscape type, and so I do not find it surprising that August types have more difficulty succeeding in the social context of school than September types. This is true only of England. In France and Spain for example, the school year ends on the 31st of December. All those born between 1st January and 31st December join the same school class when school begins in September. So any class in Spain say, has pupils younger than those in an equivalent class in England and not as old. Their transition - December/January in the TO8 represents a change in self-consciousness and individualism (actually occurring around the 13th January) and does not mark such a critical change in Landscape/non-Landscape behaviours so clear in English schools.
So, do the social media represent Landscape forms of personality more than others? Almost certainly yes. And because of this, I believe the social media will become monetised quite extensively. Facebook fans buy more than non-fans and what's more they buy more brands than others (another sociability marker - the axis 1 - 7 in the TO8). Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that he just wants people to be connected and happier, but this is perhaps the kind of conscious naiveté one might expect from a 2:4 (TO8) and is quite out of sync with the market valuation of around $140 billion, in July 2011. A lot of media marketing companies have been founded around Facebook in order to take advantage of its subscriber base to sell, sell, sell, and while small ads currently appear on Facebook pages (more than double the number of only a year ago), a simple advertising scheme along the lines of Google's AdWords that rewards individuals for the ads allowed on their web pages will inevitably arise and turn friends' interactions - up to now freely exchanged - into marketing leads and they will be inevitably less trustworthy.


While on the one hand, social media will continue to be informative, which is their attraction being the most significant way we share in news, on the other hand our preferences will become too individualised, and we will be stuck in an internet to which information is brought to us according to what they think they can sell to us. So most social media members will drift along with the tide into this monetised future where we all will be selling something to somebody. I wrote a short story long ago, Affiliate World, that satirises this Landscape future and can be read here


When writing Essential Personalities in 2007, with Facebook only recently appearing over the horizon, I underestimated the Landscape attraction to many ordinary citizens, and took it mostly at its marketing potential.  I saw the nascent social media ending up filled with pedlars of opinion for marketing purposes, and so it is proving to be. Certainly sites like Facebook have enabled social organisation on a small scale as well as more serious political organisation, but one can also see this connectivity exploited by more prosaic needs and desires.  I belong to a number of discussion forums and it interesting how every single forum collects its fair number of selling messages. It may be that we will have to live with this mix in order to communicate with each other; certainly it is difficult to see how to keep these messages down to an acceptable level.  Recent research by a Canadian company shows just how many and by how much PR companies flood forums and chat lines with 'fake' messages in order to launch their products and how companies, individual entrepreneurs and simply interested parties go to great lengths to make their videos or web pages 'go viral' for publicity purposes. The use of social media on on-line sellers' web sites also calls into question the proportion of marketing opinion to that of the general public.  There are already disputes about the lack of control over planted user reviews on Amazon.com product pages and how one will always find a positive opinion planted among those of a generally panned book. Even authors are now reviewing each others' books on the site, confirming the long term trend that displaces dispassionate reviewers from the marketplace. Because social media is enjoyable and we are still in its first flush of enthusiasms such interference may be tolerated, but it is hardly innocent, and it is certainly powerful. Not even talking to your family and friends will be free. Luckily, If I am right about the social mix of types, then users of Facebook and the combined social networks will probably plateau at around 75% of the available on-line population, of which 2/3 will be wholly committed to it, and a 1/3 less so, with the rest involved in counter-culture alternatives.


Landscape instincts are in some ways immoral. They follow the connected trends and the decisions surrounding them regardless of what they mean in abstract moral space. The end is the means, as long as it's not anarchy, and the end is belonging.